ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

hmm. "mum of six" is a compound prenominal modifier; ie the three words are doing the work of one adjective. so i'd argue that the hyphens are pretty much vital.

ultimately, what you're doing is trying to make it easier for the reader; to ensure there's no ambiguity. OK, in that example it's unlikely there's going to be any. but still ...

... just leave 'em in, eh? :)

But in my example above, it serves the same purpose as "actress" and "activist", both of which are nouns.

If, say someone existed who deeply disliked all mothers who had six children, I could admittedly say "Look out for mum-of-six-hating misanthrope Dave Smith", but otherwise... I dunno.

And actually, I think I'd still say "...mum of six-hating misanthrope..." anyway!

aye, "mum-of-six-hating" would be fine there; or you could use the awesome US en-dash convention discussed above. "mum of six-hating" is just plain wrong, though -- that would suggest Dave Smith is a misanthrope who hates the number six, and you're talking about his mum.

also, "actress" and "activist" might be nouns but the fact remains that in your example they're modifying the subject -- "angelina jolie" -- as is "mum-of-six", so they're working as adjectives. (i used to be able to explain this shit a lot more eloquently, and it annoys me that i've lost track of some of the technicalities.) either way: "but it's OK in this example!" doesn't quite cut it, because you're going to come across an example where it isn't OK, and that's where mr hyphen is really going to be your friend.

it saddens me slightly when "i don't like this rule of grammar so i'm going to ignore it" becomes house style, but hey: that's the case in some form or another in pretty much every UK newsroom, i suppose ;)

Alright, point taken - hyphens it is!

fwiw our Style Guide was constructed pretty much from scratch by me, with a lot of help from the guides of The Graun, The Economist, the Oxford Dictionary for Wrtiters & Editors, and a host of other source texts. It's also had to work with our amiable host's Brand Style - which, trust me, frequently sees the finer points of grammar (and decades of widespread global precedent) as mere irritants getting in the way of Flogging A Lot Of Stuff. Conflicting precedents are manifold, and sometimes I just have to call it for the sake of consistency.

Don't even start me on em and en-dashes - you'd think they might not even matter online, but they cause me more fucking headaches than any other punctuation mark by far!

really? is that because of online formatting issues, or something else? really, i'm a punctuation geek: i'm genuinely fascinated, if you've got the time (and inclination) to share ;)

It comes down to CMS limitations. We generally use three different management systems concurrently, not all of which can differentiate between em and en-dashes - and that's not even meentioning the reductive system we use for wap content.

I'm still seriously considering banning the use of em dashes altogether because every time someone uses one they have to insert a little bit of html into the CMS and 99% of the time they can't be fucked to do so...

Wow, typos all over my last two posts! I'll blame my oversensitive new keyboard for now...

perhaps you can suggest they use two hyphens stiched together if they can't be bothered to use an em-dash. it doesn't look as clean and it ends up being longer than an em-dash actually is but it does the job.

just out of curiosity
- hyphen!
– en-dash!
— em-dash!
-- makeshift em-dash for lazies!

...or just tell them to use hyphens for everything because that's all Notepad can handle and everything has to go through it before hitting the CMS!

Actually, we never use the m-dash at all; it's hyphen or en, and the en only shows up in some copy because Word creates it automatically.

em-dash obv.

Actress, activist and mum of six, Angelina Jolie, ...

The comma would remove any chance of confusion, and it IS a noun phrase, so I don't think it should have hyphens.

Isn't it just an inversion of Angelina Jolie, who is an actress, activist and mum of six, ...

(Although some noun phrases DO of course have hyphens - I mean I don't think it should get hyphens just because of where it is in that sentence.)

Isn't it just an inversion of Angelina Jolie, who is an actress, activist and mum of six

not necessarily. commas are really not an elegant solution to this sort of thing. it's a short step from there to stuff like: "journalist, grimly fiendish, is a short-arsed pedant", which i see every so often (interestingly, often from older writers who should know better).

regardless of what any of us might think about hyphens, there's a reasonably straightforward set of rules that govern their use (IIRC the oxford dictionary for writers and editors is very good on this). commas, however, are a free for all (and remember: i spent several months ... weeks ... OK, hours of my life studying the little fuckers for my undergrad dissertation) so although they can be used in this sort of situation, it's not necessarily a good idea to do so because you can cause more problems than you solve, and you end up with a comma-strewn mess that nobody can easily parse.

i seem to be on a mission here to rep for the hyphen. well, if that's my role in life ...

a free for all
a free-for-all

hmm. if i'd re-read that before posting, i'd definitely have hyphenated. i'm not doing myself any favours here.

"journalist grimly fiendish" is a bit slapdash - you wouldn't say that if you were writing a novel, would you?

If you said An actress, activist and mum of six, Angelina Jolie ... (dropping my extra comma after Jolie, as well) it would work, but the grammar is different. I'm happy to say I woz rong.

external debt repayment obligations
external debt repayments
natural gas fired capacity

How would you hyphenate the above, without recourse to an en dash?

external-debt-repayment obligations
external-debt repayments
natural-gas-fired capacity

Yup, that's how I'd do 'em too, but I just don't like multiple hyphens!

Iranian-rial-financed projects?

"journalist grimly fiendish" is a bit slapdash - you wouldn't say that if you were writing a novel, would you?

of course not! and i wouldn't put it in the newspaper i work for, either: our style would be "grimly fiendish, a journalist, is a short arsed-pedant", or "the actress angelina jolie, a mother of eight, is over-rated".

but it's still preferable to the pointless-comma approach. basically, in an awful lot of cases, "mum-of-12 angelina jolie said she didn't give a fuck about grammar" would be fine, with nary a comma in sight.

perhaps i didn't make this clear enough. i'm not moaning about restricted relative clauses ...

correct usage:

An ILX0r was yesterday accused of being a short-arsed pedant.

Grimly Fiendish, a journalist, was called "a twat" and "a knob-end" by fellow posters, etc etc

or

A disillusioned sub-editor, Grimly Fiendish, yesterday announced his plans for a campaign to save the hyphen

-- although the second, while gramatically correct, is horrible from a news-writing point of view.

what i'm talking about is this kind of shit:

"An ILX0r is running dangerously low on ideas to illustrate an unimportant grammatical point.

Journalist, Grimly Fiendish, said: "Fuck this for a lark, I'm going to make a cup of tea."

that makes my blood boil. like my kettle should be doing.

actually, i need to add a caveat to that second example ("a disillusioned ...") -- that's obviously meant to be a lede, ie introducing me and my job for the first time. if i'd been introduced as "Grimly Fiendish" before that but without any mention of my job, it'd be -- say -- "A disillusioned sub-editor, Mr Fiendish yesterday blah blah " ...

Oh man I get this all the time:

Chief executive of Megacorps, Keith Mandement, said: "Blah fucking blah"

So many commas! Ugh.

Megacorps chief executive Keith Mandement said:

ta-dah.

You see, we have to put the commas in, but the sentence would have to read without whatever is inside them. As in A disillusioned sub-editor, Grimly Fiendish, yesterday announced his plans for a campaign to save the hyphen

This leads to lots of stupid annoying sentences with "a" rather than "the", but it is consistent.

I'm not too sure of the grammar of Megacorps chief executive Keith Mandement said: in anything other than journalese. What are they doing there, all those nouns? They are a compound prenominal modifier, are they? Why aren't they hyphenated?

We would do it The chief executive of megacorps, Keith Mandement, said:

What are they doing there, all those nouns? They are a compound prenominal modifier, are they? Why aren't they hyphenated?

I sort of answered this above with respect to the "then law clerk William Rehnquist" example:

I think the confusion here is that "then law clerk" looks like an adjectival phrase that modifies the noun William Rehnquist (in which case hyphenating the whole thing seems useful), but it's not: "law clerk" is the noun and "William Rehnquist" is an appositive.

Likewise, "chief executive" is the noun here.

i think the lotsa commas thing is more american - the sentence that boiled your blood looks perfectly normal to me

No, it makes my blood boil as well.

the sentence that boiled your blood looks perfectly normal to me

?!

thank you, jaymc :)

Journalist, Grimly Fiendish, said: "Fuck this for a lark, I'm going to make a cup of tea."

I can't tell whether Tracer's gone Euro-native or what side he's taking, but this construction is surely blood-boilingly awful. I think of this as a flat-out mistake, and not a stylistic inclination, partly because I rarely see it in anything that's at all professional or edited or decently written -- but part of me does feel like I see it more often in British writing than American, possibly just because Brit comma use seems a bit more fast-and-loose than American, in many cases.

I mean it reads like saying "President, Bush has scheduled a press conference"

^^ I mean that's not an analogy, since it's not a TITLE, but it reads exactly that bizarrely to me

possibly just because Brit comma use seems a bit more fast-and-loose than American

nabisco, OTM.

Mothers of six don't need hyphens any more than photographers of nudes or makers of books. As with most grammar, I know this without knowing why.

external debt repayment obligations
external debt repayments
natural gas-fired capacity

To draw a conclusion, groups of words don't necessarily need hyphens to be read as a group.

Pete, I agree with you about "mothers of six" but not with those other three examples. With "external debt repayments," for instance, there's no way to know without a hyphen if "external" modifies "debt" or "repayments." It might be reasonably puzzled out, but why make the reader work harder?

exactly.

natural gas-fired capacity

is that the natural capacity when the thing in question is gas-fired, then?

you can "draw a conclusion" all you want, but i think i'll be sticking with the prescribed rules of grammar as opposed to the arbitrary rules of pete ;)

natural gas-fired capacity

is that the natural capacity when the thing in question is gas-fired, then?

You're right, I feel like I'm looking at a Magic Eye painting and seeing it for the first time. Something needs to by hyphened here without any outside context:

external-debt repayment obligations
external debt-repayment obligations
external-debt-repayment obligations
external debt-repayment-obligations

That said, no hyphens is often just fine so long as you know from the context which words modify which, e.g.:

"If you want to steal natural gas, you better find a natural gas-fired furnace."

or

"I've got so many external debt repayments to make, we'd better talk about my external debt repayment obligations."

And the fact that those are shitty sentences is not helped by adding hyphens.

"If you want to steal natural gas, you better find a natural gas-fired furnace."

Hahaha this still has room for wonkiness: it could be advising you that your gas-fired furnace should not be synthetic.

(Hence the en-dash rule in that situation.)

Also, I know I always say this, but I am very much against leaning overmuch on "context" in grammar discussions, since it evades the basic question being asked (i.e., "what is a coherent rule that helps solve this problem regardless of context"). And, like I always say, this is because I spend some time at work reading complex legal disclaimers about credit rates and insurance policies and the likelihood of your medication having side effects -- situations in which there's no such thing about reliable context* and even if there were, it'd be a bit risky to hang the risk of class-action lawsuits on its being fully understood.

* e.g., you can't say "oh, my credit card issuer couldn't possibly mean it the other way, that'd be completely unfair and exploitative toward the consumer"

Yeah, you're right again about "natural-gas-fired furnace," I give on that one. But it's no evasion to insist on context as an essential element of any question about grammar outside of the narrow legalese you're talking about. Notice my second examples stands just fine. Why make an arbitrary rule pretending that it doesn't?

This thread is the first time I've ever heard of n-dashes.

"The aviatrix, Amelia Earhart" looks more right to me than "Aviatrix Amelia Earhart"

(I would never drop the "The" in the first place)

But perhaps this should go to the comma roundtable

I think the real answer is never, ever use the word "aviatrix."

"The aviatrix, Amelia Earhart" makes it sound like she's the only person who's ever been an aviatrix, though.

The Aviatrix Reloaded, Amelia Earhart

"The aviatrix, Amelia Earhart" makes it sound like she's the only person who's ever been an aviatrix, though.

This is why I said in our house style you get a lot of "a" instead of "the". Which can be annoying. You could say The troubled bank HBOS , but we have to say A troubled bank, HBOS
I agree that Grimly's blood-boiling sentence is just wrong, so I don't think that's a Brit-US difference. It's just the basic point that if you set something aside in commas, the rest of the sentence has to work on its own, and no-one would consider Journalist said: "Fuck this for a lark, I'm going to make a cup of tea." to be correct.

That's why my attempt to avoid the hyphens in mum of six was wrong. (Although if you add "a", it works fine, as I said.)

However, while I accept that Megacorps chief executive Keith Mandement said ... and Actress, activist and mum-of-six Angelina Jolie are common usage, I just don't understand what's going on grammatically there, which is why I can't say whether mum of six should have hyphens or not. But why there and not with Megacorps chief executive? Is it because mum of six is a NP made up of a N plus a prepositional phrase? Whereas Megacorps chief executive is just a compound noun? What if you did it Chief executive of Megacorps Keith Mandement? No-one would hyphenate that, but the only difference is that the main noun is a compound again.

Genuinely seeking Grimly wisdom here.

Back to hyphenation in adjectival phrases:

oh, my credit card issuer couldn't possibly mean it the other way, that'd be completely unfair and exploitative toward the consumer

You see, we'd do this credit-card issuer.

I think the rules are perhaps more ambiguous than Grimly is allowing. Where a compound noun is clearly recognised as a unit do you have to hyphenate it when you use it adjectivally?

In my examples, I think external debt definitely needs to be hyphenated, as it is the debt that is external (ie owed to other countries, not your own banks), but you could argue that repayment obligations is a compound noun, that you are then modifying, although I went with the all-hyphens approach in the end. I just think there is a lot of room between the rules for interpretation here. Or is there?

Also, where you have something in attributive position you hyphenate it, but if it's used predicatively you don't ie a high-quality piece of sub-editing but Grimly's work is very high quality .

So in my text, it actually read Two-thirds of capacity is natural gas-fired . What would you do there?

But why there and not with Megacorps chief executive?

i think jaymc's explanation above is the one i'm going to cling to here ... i will try to ponder this more, but i really should be doing something else right now. bugger, this is going to bug me all day.

Where a compound noun is clearly recognised as a unit

but "clear recognition" is in the eye of the reader, not the writer. one of my tasks as a sub is to ensure that no reader needs to stop and say: hang on, i need to re-read that; it doesn't mean what i think it meant. from a psycholinguistic PoV, all sorts of things could affect the way someone's reading something -- those little bits of punctuation simply serve to make things a little more obvious.

sorry, this is a really surface-level engagement with a really interesting thread, but GAAAAH i need to crack on and be reading about the central nervous system right now :)

as for this:

Two-thirds of capacity is natural gas-fired

two-thirds of capacity is natural-gas-fired

OR

two-thirds of capacity is fired by natural gas